


Eyes, Mouth, Teeth

by quigonejinn



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2012-10-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 12:08:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Hale crawls out of the grave and Lydia Martin's head.  Who couldn't do with a little bit of amnesia?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eyes, Mouth, Teeth

**Author's Note:**

> I am 150% aware that Peter Hale is godawful creepy rapist. This fic is 150% aware that Peter Hale is godawful creep rapist. This fic is 10,000+ words of trying to make you 150% creeped out by telling you, in great detail, about Peter Hale's dead werewolf tragedy sob story while he does incredibly godawful creepy rapist kinky things to Lydia Martin.
> 
> In other words, the non-con warning on this is serious, _serious_ one. If you have non-con or abuse triggers, this is not a fic for you. 
> 
> Set between S2E9 and S2E11. There is referenced Stiles/Lydia and Lydia/Jackson, but the primary focus is Peter/Lydia.

You're in the kitchen with your back to the window. Sunlight is pouring over your shoulders, and Lydia comes downstairs in an oversized pink t-shirt. She frowns, not quite sure what you're doing there. The newspaper is spread out in front of you; you're making toast and coffee.

"Breakfast?" you say.

"Who _are_ you?" she says back.

There is dirt on her knees and a smear of it on her cheek. 

...

The Martins have a nice house. Big beautiful yard out front, three car garage, big pool in the back. Beautiful eat-in kitchen with nice countertops. There is a maid service and a lawn company and people who come by with a van to make sure the chemicals in the pool are right, so even though Lydia really, really doesn't _do_ housework, the house is clean. It smells nice. It looks nice. 

...

"Your parents let you drink coffee?" 

She makes a face at you over the double-sized mug that she poured herself; Lydia is drinking it black, her face a little screwed up over the taste, but she finished a mug of it. Tired. She moves like she is sore in every muscle, and now that she is sitting at the table, out of the corner of your eye, you see that there is dirt on her hands, too. 

"You didn't answer my question. Who are you?" 

"Seriously," you say, looking up from the newspaper. "You don't remember me?"

"No?"

"Grandpa Martin's 80th birthday party?"

Blank look.

"Cousin Denise''s wedding? The one with the sparkler parade and the end? The one where the ringbearer ran away with the ring and hid, because he was shy, and they had to coax him out with Oreos every four feet down the aisle?"

She frowns, and you see her struggling to put words on it. You let her try for another second or two.

"I'm your uncle," you say.

"Uncle Peter?" she says back, sounding a little stunned, and finally looking you in the face. 

You smile. "Who else?"

You push the plate of toast towards her, because even if her parents let her drink coffee, she shouldn't do it on an empty stomach. 

She hesitates, but eventually takes a piece of toast, dry, and nibbles on it. She stays out of arm's reach. 

The clothes you're wearing look familiar to her. After all, you had Lydia buy them for you before the moon came up.

...

Lydia eats two slices of toast. Lydia drinks three mugs of coffee, then takes the main section of the newspaper when you're done with it, and you study the way the light catches in her hair, on the freckles on her throat, the neat way she eats. When she finally asks, you remind her that her parents are out of town, but they know she's been having a rough time. You tell her that you're in town for some meetings downtown, so why stay at a hotel, her mother said. Come over and stay at our place, she had said. Keep an eye on --

Lydia blinks at this. She doesn't know whether to believe you, whether to trust that someone is paying attention, but when she comes home from school that afternoon, you're on the couch in the living room, reading and working through piles of paperwork. 

You look up and smile at her; she doesn't quite smile back. 

"I went to the store and got groceries," you say. "There's food in the fridge if you want it." She doesn't say anything, but fifteen minutes later, she comes back into the living room, settles on the opposite side of the couch, and eats an apple while watching MTV. Great, tearing bites, unlike the toast from this morning. It's as though she forgot to eat for a while, but has now remembered the she is so, so hungry. 

Dinner is Chinese delivery because, as you say to her, you don't quite trust your ability to boil water. 

...

After all --

...

In the beginning, she tells you to order for yourself: she isn't hungry, but when you get the take-out menu from her favorite place in town, she bites down on her lower lip. She hovers within earshot while you order General Tso's chicken and spring rolls and two fried chicken wings, and when you look over at her hanging at the edge of the kitchen, she shrugs, so you order on her behalf: pepper beef with broccoli. The store throws in a container of hot-and-sour soup, plus a bag of fried noodles, and the two of you eat on the coffee table in the living room. 

Afterwards, Lydia gets her homework out and does it in the living room. Not the greatest habit, you'll admit, but she's picking at the last of the spring rolls, eating any pieces of General Tso's chicken that you didn't finish, so you don't say anything. 

When she finishes her homework, you're reading the Economist with the TV on in the background. Out of the corner of your eye, you see her reach a hand up to the remote next to you. She hesitates; you make sure not to react. A moment later, she picks up the remote and changes the channel from something called _Teen Moms_ to C-SPAN II. She knows the channel number by heart. You smile, don't say anything, and you know she is watching you and watching you and watching you: you see her visibly relax. She might actually pay attention to the TV show now.

Halfway through the program -- something about a round-table discussion of a British author's opinions on the United States -- she slides off the couch and sits on the floor.

You notice that maybe she is only half a couch-length away from you.

It shouldn't surprise you, but it does: your sense of smell is coming back, and Lydia smells unbelievably, amazing good to you. 

...

After all, you --

...

All those years that you were in the long-term care facility --

...

"You're a good kid," you say in the morning when she comes downstairs, dressed for school, but clearly looking for coffee. There is a pot of it brewed and ready, plus a mug already sitting out for her. "If you want, there are leftovers you can take in for lunch." 

She looks up from her coffee with a slightly irritated expression; you laugh and go back to your breakfast and newspaper, but she does go to the refrigerator and clean out every last scrap of leftovers from the night before. 

...

She smells like shampoo and conditioner and shower gel and all the make-up that she wears.  
...

Lydia _is_ a good kid. She got you out of that grave, didn't she? Brought the moon to you, brought Derek to the house, helped you walk to the car that you told her to drive over. Waited in the parking lot across the street while you went to take a look at the goings-on at the police station. Maybe she doesn't quite need to remember everything, maybe on your way out of her head and back into her body, you had a few words with her subconscious about forgetting certain things, but she didn't need to remember those things anyways. She deserves this. You'll do whatever you can for her. 

You listen to her car start up in the driveway. 

Lydia is a good kid. 

...

She comes home after school and eats a peanut butter sandwich with peanut butter you bought, with bread that you bought, and then goes for a run. She comes back, flushed and happy, and you sit in the kitchen with a topographical map of Beacon Hills and listen to her thump up the stairs, headphones still playing. She showers, and dinner is pasta from a box with tomato sauce from a jar and meatballs made in the microwave, but Lydia cleans her plate and goes back into the kitchen for more. You smile. She is too busy eating to notice: strange how not having screaming nightmares, how getting a good night of sleep improves the appetite. 

You're improving rapidly. It seems like Lydia is too, isn't she? 

...

Six years ago, you had a family. Six years ago you had a pack: you were married. You had two children, thoughts of another. How many months ago did you kill your niece in order to become the alpha? You had a nephew and a niece left, and now, you have one nephew left. 

You needed money. 

...

Dinner is in front of the TV, and afterwards, you think Lydia is going to reach for the remote control and change it to C-SPAN again: instead, she pulls her hand back and says she is going upstairs. She takes her plate to the sink, turns off the lights in the kitchen. Bed early, but either you did something that made her remember or something else set her off, because an hour and a half later, she is back downstairs, wearing that ridiculous, voluminous pink t-shirt with her legs sticking out underneath.

She comes into the room quietly, but sits down heavily on the couch far at the end, wraps her arms around her knees. She has been crying; she is still shaking. 

You turn and look at her. 

"You okay?"

Lydia tries to say something, so you mute the television: she can't get any words out, so you set the Economist aside and slide over on the couch. You put one hand on her back and start to rub in slow, steady circles. You make equally slow, soothing noises. You even consider drawing some of the fear out of her if you can, but eventually, a little reluctantly, she turns her face into your shoulder. You put your arm fully around her, and she lets out a breath, but it's still shaky. She doesn't try words again. 

"I hate not being able to help you," you say, finally, and Lydia curls up on herself for a moment. 

You're about to let go of her shoulders when she turns and kisses you. 

You open your mouth in surprise, and she touches her tongue to your teeth. She goes on kissing you; in fact, she climbs into your lap and puts her arms around your neck. You kiss her back and slide your hands under her shirt. First, you just have them at her waist, but when she leans into the kiss, puts one hand behind your head and kisses you harder, you slide your right hand upwards. She took her bra off before bed, and you rest one hand on her ribcage. When she takes a breath, you can feel it under that hand; when she lets a breath out, you can feel it, too. You slide a hand up further; one of her breasts just fits into your hand, and she moans into her mouth, so you tip her over back on the couch and keep on kissing her. You keep your hand on her breast. Lydia starts to undo your belt, and both still have all your clothes on, but you make a mistake: you touch your mouth to her neck. You have one hand on her breast; you have one of her arms pinned to her side, and her panic attack comes bubbling back and--

You push off her. You know your worry shows on your face. Regret. More than a little shame. "I'm sorry. We shouldn't be doing this."

Lydia looks at you. She can't manage words for a moment, so you pull further away, but she hooks her hands on your belt. She blinks, and you watch her close eyes, open them again.

Lydia says, "It's the -- it's not you." 

You recognize the expression on her face, don't you? 

Lydia feels under the cushions of the couch with one hand because, as she says sort of laughing in a shaky way, that she and -- her old boyfriend used to do this a lot because her parents weren't around then, and it wasn't like her mom ever cleaned when she was around, so Lydia just slipped the housekeeper a fifty bucks every month to leave the condoms where she found 'em. Lydia doesn't come up with anything underneath the cushions, but she finds a condom wedged between them. You roll her on top of you, so that she can control the pace. She decides when to undo your belt; she decides not to take her t-shirt off, and she decides when to step out of her underwear.

The two of you fuck on the couch with the TV still on mute, and she curls up with her head on your arm and your hand on her hip; she turns her face into your side and takes a deep breath, as though she likes the way you smell. She falls sound asleep. 

...

Six years ago, you had a family. Six years ago you had a pack: you were married. You had two children, thoughts of another.

...

After she is asleep, you tuck a blanket around her and go upstairs to sleep. In the morning, you shower, shave, brush your teeth and come downstairs. You turn the TV off, and as quietly as you can, you go get the newspaper in the driveway. It's a sunny morning; when you come back into the house, you consider carrying her upstairs to her bed, but decide against it since she had the panic attack last night. You sit back down in the kitchen. You make coffee, and half an hour later, Lydia comes into the kitchen, barefoot, wearing the pink t-shirt from before. She gets herself a mug of coffee and sits down across from you.

"About last night," you say.

She looks up from her mug.

"Do you feel bad about it?" she says.

"I feel -- "

"I wanted it, and so did you. We used a condom." Lydia takes a strand of her hair between two fingers and winds it around the first "We're not even really related. I mean, your mom is Grandpa Martin's second wife." 

You lift your eyebrows. This isn't something you expected; in your mind, you'd been her father's brother or something along those lines, an actual blood relation, but Lydia, bless her, reads this as you not quite thinking that the lack of a DNA relationship doesn't change anything, so she comes around to your side of the table.

You put your hands on her waist: she's naked underneath the t-shirt, and even after all the eating of the past few days, Lydia is a skinny, skinny girl. The light catches in her hair, but she tastes like your mouth from last night, and when you put your right hand on the inside of her thigh and slide it upwards, you find she's already wet. There is a moment of fear when you pull her into your lap, but she conquers it and puts her hands on your shoulders and kisses you: Lydia won't quite let you go down on her, but she straddles you on the chair, and she comes and comes and comes with her hand on her clit and your arm around her waist, holding her on the fingers you have inside her. 

...

It's Saturday. The two of you are alone all day, and Lydia won't let you go down on her if she is naked. There is a mark on her body she doesn't want to show, she says. A scar. She doesn't explain any further, but the two of you work out a compromise: you go down on her in against one of the walls in her bedroom. She puts on a blouse and a skirt that is, for her, long-ish in that it goes most of the way down to her knees. You start down at her bare feet, kissing her ankles, then her calves, then the inside of her knees, then up her thighs. The skirt is pale blue, so when you duck your head underneath it, the light from the window is tinted the same color. She grips your hair through the skirt, but lets go because you need to slide her panties down over her hips, down her knees, down, her thighs. 

You follow them with your tongue, first on the left leg, then the right. 

Lydia steps out of her underwear and you ease her knees apart. It's been a long, long time since you've gone down on female anatomy, but the parts still work the way you remember. Lydia mostly tastes salty, but is also a little sweet: it lingers on the tongue. It might just be your imagination. Again: it's been a long, long time since you've gone down on a girl, let alone one that shifts and sighs and makes a noise in her throat when you slide a finger into her, but slide it back out before she can really enjoy it. She does like fingers spreading her apart, though,, and you go down on her once against the wall. After she comes for the second time that day, she leans against the wall, a little weak in the knees. You pick her up and put her on her bed. 

It's still afternoon. The curtains on the windows are drawn back; you strip her shirt off her and drop it on the floor. She isn't wearing a bra. You reach down to undo the skirt, too, but she stops you. 

"No?" you say.

She shakes her head. "No."

So you slide down off the edge of the bed. Your jaw is starting to hurt, but you go down on her again. Her legs hang off the side, and since this'll be her third time today, you have time to work through things thoroughly. It's soon enough after getting her off the first time that she is still dazed and a little loopy, but she starts to tell you with words: _I like this_ , _no, stop that_. _Go back_. 

The afternoon sun creeps across the floor. 

Dinner is homemade lasagna and salad. When Lydia reaches up for the plates, her shirt hitches up, and you see the scar on her skin, vivid and red. 

...

"Your ex-wife," she says, head tilted a little side with lasagna on her fork. 

You look over; the two of you are eating at the kitchen table, rather than in front of the TV. Family dinner. 

"Do you see her at all?"

You shake your head. 

"How'd you guys meet?"

"College," you say, finally. "Why the curiosity?" 

"I remember her from Cousin Denise''s wedding."

You lift your eyebrows at her, but don't say anything after that, and after dinner, she gets out a pile of journal print outs and goes and sits on the couch with a highlighter in her hands, the cap in her mouth, and Congressional hearings on the TV in the background. You clear the table and load the dishwasher. 

...

On Sunday, you work upstairs on her dad's laptop, and mid-afternoon, Lydia takes her journal articles and goes to sit out by the pool. She slathers herself with sunscreen, and you watch from the upstairs window. It used to be her dad's study. 

...

When Lydia gets scared --

...

As far as you know, none of your nieces or nephews lived to get married. None of them were named Denise. 

...

You did, however, meet your wife in college: some unimaginably period of time distant, you went to college, because your parents were werewolves, and they wanted to give you options>. Plus, you had pretty decent control of your shapeshifting, good enough that you played basketball in high school. You ended up going to to UCLA, and you remember bringing your wife home to meet your mother for the first time: she knew the outline of what you were, believed you because you had partially shifted in front of her, and she met your mother and father and your sister and two of your cousins at dinner, over roast chicken and green beans, and then, you'd taken her hand and the two of you had gone out onto the front porch of the house. 

"Bring the wine," you'd said. 

She sat down on the swinging bench next to you.

"Shouldn't we be helping your mom with the dishes?" There was a little light coming through the windows from the kitchen and dining room inside, and you shook your head. 

"She'll make my sister do them," you'd said. "Listen, this is important." 

She looked at you, wondering if you were going to propose, but instead, you stayed on the swinging bench, and you waited: she started to say something, but you told her to listen, and she went quiet again. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, twenty-five seconds. Thirty. The moon hit the top of the trees, and the howling started. It came from up on the ridge; it came from down in the ravine by the creek. The hair on the back of your neck stood up because you wanted to be out there with them, or at the very least inside next to your mother, your alpha, but you kept hold of your girlfriend's hand. 

Ten minutes late, your uncle and your other sister and two more cousins came out. Your uncle was cracking his jaw, and the cousins were fighting about who had been stupid enough to chase a rabbit. 

Your mother came out onto the porch, dish towel in her hands, and you remember Alice's hand in yours, still and a little cool. Her mouth was hanging open, wine forgotten, but when you turned to look at her, she mustered herself and squeezed your hand and smiled. Your mother put her hand on Alice's shoulder and asked if anybody wanted ice cream. 

This memory is vivid. You spent six years thinking about it. Why wouldn't it be?

...

On Sunday night, Lydia has a nightmare. She is screaming and screaming and sobbing in her bed, and the crash of something being knocked to the floor wakes you: you come into her room at a run. Moonlight falls over the foot of her bed, and she fights you when you try to put your arms around her. She is tangled in the sheets; she is throwing herself against the walls, and you put your arms around her and hold and hold her until she wakes up. You might not be strong on the werewolf scale, but with the passing days, you've gotten strong enough to keep a small, not particularly muscled teenage girl from hurting herself. 

After a while, Lydia wakes.

After she wakes, she stops screaming. Instead, she just sobs. 

"I don't -- " She can't get more than that out because she is sobbing so hard, and she puts her arms around your neck, so that you can't straighten up off the bed. She burrows against you, and she starts to hyperventilate. Every bone and inch of hers is trembling; the panic makes her hyperventilate, and the symptoms of hyperventilation breed panic, so you wriggle one hand out from under her and put your fingers over her mouth. You press her mouth together, and she fights you for a second until you look her in the eye. 

"Breathe out your nose," you say. "Slowly. Breathe in. Through your nose." 

She starts a sob, but finds she can't get air out from under your hand, so she has to breathe out through her nose first, and the next breath she takes in is -- slower. Shaky, but slower. She breathes out. Again through the nose. You can feel the warm air over your fingers, and you take your hand off her mouth. 

Lydia's eyes are enormous and dark in her face. The moonlight has slid halfway up her bed, and you start to straighten again, but she doesn't let go of your neck. She hangs on for dear life. 

"You want to sleep with me tonight?" 

"Please," she manages.

Lydia is wearing a nightgown, and you slide your hands under her and carry her to your bed. You settle her under the covers. 

You don't ask what she was dreaming about.

...

Who taught you the trick with the hand? Lydia remembers her as your _ex-wife_ , but you remember her as the girl from your sophomore Anthro class, the one with the great smile, who you went on a couple dates with, and you liked her a lot, and she must have liked you, because the two of you started sleeping together once in a while, and you stopped sleeping with other people, and she stopped, too, and three months into that stage of it, you woke with her trying to keep you from throwing yourself through her fourth-floor window. The moon wasn't even full; the dream hadn't even been one related to being a werewolf or the pack. Just standard pre-exam worry, regular, human terror, and woke with her arms around you, trying to hang on for dear life, and you remember the panic flooding you. _Did I scratch you? Did I bite you? Oh God, did I --_

The last time you checked, you hadn't been an alpha, but you were living on your own. You were managing your own life. Killing another alpha was the surest way, but there were cases of spontaneous conversion, and it terrified you: you worked yourself into a hyperventilating, shaking fit, and she put her hand over your mouth and made you breathe through your nose, and when you were capable of breathing through your nose, she made you tell her --

...

How did you learn this response to hearing a crying, terrified kid in the grip of nightmares?

Once upon a time, you had two of your own. The younger one inherited your tendency for nightmares when stressed. 

You haven't had any nightmares since coming back from the dead.

...

Before going to sleep, you don't ask Lydia what she was dreaming about, and in the morning, you wake her hair spread over the two of you. Her head is, in fact, propped on your chest, and when you wake, it wakes her. 

She smiles at you, lazy and slow. It's a sunny morning. Light is coming through the curtains, and you kiss her with two fingers under her chin. Lydia starts to slide under the covers, presumably to give you a morning blowjob. Instead, you push the covers down, then turn her over your lap, and hitch up her nightgown. You tell her to slide her panties down; she gets them down most of the way, and you pull them down to her knees. For not getting them down all the way, you bring the palm of your hand against her ass. Lydia wriggles. 

"Do you like that?" you say.

She turns her head out from under the mattress, and Lydia is a natural strawberry blonde. Without foundation or makeup on, she flushes easily, and you can see just how flushed her face is. 

"I don't know," she says, and she honestly does look confused. From being inside her head, you know the kinkiest thing she ever did with any of her boyfriends, Jackson or otherwise, was pinning them to the bed and maybe, possibly, using novelty handcuffs while they went down on her. One time, Jackson asked if she wanted to try anal and was horrified when she thought that he wanted her to fuck _him_ up the ass.

Now, the print of your hand is bright red against Lydia's skin, and you smack her again. When you look up at her face, you see that her eyes are closed. 

"You're wet," you say to her. "Say it."

"I'm -- " she says, eyes still closed. She looks like she is trying to remember something, like she is struggling with some emotion.

"The whole sentence." 

"I'm wet," she says. There is a catch in her voice. 

You don't even have to put a finger into her to check, because she is dripping against your knee. As soon as she admits to being wet, you put your forearm over her in place and you spank her until she is wriggling in discomfort, not just arousal. You have to haul her back into your lap, and she fights you: you're stronger than her now, though, and you pull her back and go on spanking her until her ass is bright red and both of you are sweating, and then, you slide one finger into her. She turns her face into the bed and moans like her world is ending. You slide two into her, and she bucks against your knee.

You finger fuck Lydia until she comes, face down and screaming. 

...

"It's Monday," you say to Lydia.

Lydia looks over the table at you. She has a piece of toast in her hand. "And?"

"Aren't you going to school today?"

Lydia turns up her mouth and doesn't move from her seat across the table.

...

"No, really, aren't you going to go to school?"

"Do I look like I'm going to school?" 

She is still in the nightgown that you spanked and finger-fucked her in. She hasn't taken a shower, and you washed your hands, but you're pretty sure that even if you weren't a werewolf, you could still smell her on your fingers. You had two fingers in her for a long, long time, and she isn't quite sitting completely on the chair. She is sort of at an angle and, every few minutes, shifts. 

The kitchen clock reads 9:30. School, you're pretty sure, has started by now.

"It isn't like I can't miss today.. I could pull C's in every class from now until the end of the year, and it would still be mathematically impossible for anybody to be ranked ahead of me in my class." 

You look up from your newspaper and study the red mark on her shoulder, just visible at the edge of the shirt collar. It might be a bite from you. It might have been from your hands, when you were holding her face-down on the mattress while she came.

"So what are you doing today?" she says, still holding the slice of toast with a bite out of it.

"What do you want to do today?" you say. 

She grins from ear to ear, and the sight, unexpectedly, makes you feel cheerful. 

...

"How did you know I'd gotten -- divorced?" you ask.

"Mom must have talked about it," she says.

The two of you are in her dad's Jaguar, and Lydia, being Lydia, said she had some interlibrary loan books she need to pick up at the library at UC Santa Cruz. She wanted you to drive her out there, wait while she got her books, and have lunch with her. It's a little bit of a drive. 

"How're your kids?" She frowns. "What're their names? John and A-something? Alexandra?"

"Alexis," you say. You narrow your eyes because the sun is hitting you in the eyes, and you check your blind spot before changing lanes. "They're fine. With their mom." 

There are holes in your mem --

...

You hadn't expected to live inside Lydia's head as vividly as you did: you hadn't expected to live at all. Alphas put themselves into the mind of every werewolf they make, but it takes time for that to become a path out of the grave -- full moons. Pack kills. Defense of territory, blood mixed on the ground, shared joy, shared grief. What connection could you have had with Lydia? 

Why was she immune? 

...

Apparently, in addition to the books on interlibrary loan, there were a couple things that they were supposed to pull for her, but didn't, so she had to go up to science and engineering stacks and get them herself. You spend the time wandering in the library lobby, and you look at the display on adaptive optics. Your arms are crossed over your chest; you read the little plaques and look at the model, then look back at the explanatory text on the other side of the model with the formula supposedly explaining the display. 

You stop. You frown. 

Lydia has some of your memories.

You have some of Lydia's --

...

"I know," Lydia says, coming out with books and photocopies in her arms and seeing you frowning down at the explanatory text. She makes a face. "They should fix the typo in that formula."

She pauses for a moment, trying to read the expression on your face, then decides she doesn't care enough to keep trying. "I want pizza for lunch." 

...

Lydia has some of your memories.

You have some of Lydia's knowledge.

...

The two of you settle into one of the nicer pizza joints in town. It actually looks like it might use real vegetables to top the pizzas, and she wants pineapple and ham. You order mushrooms on your half. When you come back with the pizza and a bottle of water for yourself and a fountain Diet Coke for her, she looks up from her phone. There are tears in her eyes, but she pretends that she wants your Diet Coke instead. You let her have it. 

"We'll do something nice tonight," you say and watch Lydia as she jams her phone back into her purse. She looks up with her jaw set

The books and photocopies from the library are sitting on the table next to her left elbow.

...

When Lydia gets scared --

...

When Lydia gets frightened --

...

You should come clean: the first time you had sex with Lydia, it was inside her head at the hospital. You bit her on the lacrosse field in reality, but inside her mind, for weeks, you were fucking her on the grass. Every night, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the middle of class, she would run from you, and each and every time, you would grab her by the shoulders and force her down on the grass, bear her down flat underneath you and fuck her until she went still. Then, you would turn her over and kiss her until she stopped trying to bite you back, until she started to whimper, and then, you would start to fuck her again. Every time she tried to turn her face from you, you would kiss her again, and it was in the mind, so it could go on for a long, long time: as long as you wanted. As long as she kept trying to shrink away from you, and even after that, as long as you could feel how scared she was, in both body and mind. 

Sometimes, you let her wear the gown she had been wearing to the formal. Other times, she was naked. Other times, too, she would start out wearing the formal dress, and by the end, she would be naked and smeared in dirt. 

At first, you did it to scare her, to assert your control. Then, you did it because you liked it.

Before you slipped back into your body, your last thought inside Lydia's brain was _forget_. 

It was imperfect. You waited too long to give the command; you hadn't expected that she would keep the memory of fear in her brains. You hadn't expected the degree to which she would, in her actual body, let you and actually _want_ you to fuck her brains out. 

...

Lydia has some of your memories.

You have some of Lydia's knowledge.

Did Lydia pick up --

...

The last memory you have of your wife and children is a brutally ugly one: hunters had surrounded the house, shot anybody trying to exit, with a squad working through the house room by room and herding everyone into the basement. 

You and one of your cousins, Eleanor, tried to make a stand in the west wing. Back to back. _Tooth to tooth_ , she put it. Maybe distract them long enough for some of the children and non-werewolves to make it out. She broke two necks, and you'd torn the face off of one hunter, but they had numbers. They had guns. There were smoke grenades laced with wolfsbane. You don't know why they turned Eleanor's head into blood spray with a close shotgun blast, but paused when they had you on your knees. 

"Please," you'd said.

Was it because you were willing to beg? 

...

You remember: Eleanor had told them to fuck themselves and jumped at the gun. You knew that was the moment you ought to try and join her; she went to UCLA two years after you did, when you were a _wise_ junior, and her mother asked your mother to have you keep an eye on her. The two of you had gotten drunk together more than a couple times in school, and when she threw herself at them, figuring that she'd buy you a chance to get away at best and save herself long, slow torture at worst, they blew her head to mist.

You should have jumped, too, or maybe tried to get away, but you didn't move. They turned the shotgun to you, and it was a woman holding the gun: not Kate Argent, but you recognized her from seeing her around town. At the gas station. Once in a while at the grocery store. Had she been following you? Keeping tabs on the werewolves?

Eleanor hadn't been willing to beg. 

You had more to lose. 

"Please," you said. "My wife isn't a werewolf." 

You had been in agony. You were half-blind from your own blood: you think you'd been hit on the side of your face with buckshot impregnated with wolfsbane, and the blood running down your cheeks, into your eyes, laced with the stuff. Everywhere your blood ran, it burned, and without them having to ask, you sank down to your knees. There were eight of them in the room with you, another six upstairs if you were hearing right. You could hear the screams in the basement, smell the smoke. Two of them were standing by the door leading up from the basement, shooting anything that tried to come out of the smoke. You were still werewolf enough to hear all this and smell Eleanor's blood in the air. 

The two of you had gotten drunk once on the roof of the engineering building: she had been a civic engineering major, and she knew how to get in and out of spaces she wasn't supposed to. You remember it: the gravel on the rooftop, the sound of the HVAC system for the building, the moon coming up full over the hills, and there the two of you were, splitting two cheap six-packs and talking about cute girls. The moonlight caught on her shoulders, and hair and she was giddy being able to stay human during the moon. 

"Please," you said, slowly, clearly "My wife isn't a werewolf. One of my children isn't either."

The woman didn't take the shotgun off you, but she did smile, pleased. You didn't think she was an Argent by birth. "Which one?"

You could feel the blood burning on your face.

"Well?" she said, still smiling. "You gonna name names? Because I know you have two, Peter." 

Every hour of every day of every long, terrible year where you were in the long-term care facility you thought about that moment: on your knees in Eleanor's blood, listening to the screams and sobbing from basement, trying to figure out if one or the other of your children was alive, so that you could beg for that child's life. You didn't hear either of their voices. Once, you heard a sound that could have been Alice crying. Did that mean one of your children had died? 

You picked one of your children over the other. 

...

Every hour of every day of every long, terrible year where you were in the long-term care facility, you thought about that moment: on your knees in your cousin's blood, trying to figure out which of your children you could save.

In the long-term care facility, it hadn't just been the burns keeping you quiet: there was guilt and shame and anger and so, so much regret. 

...

"What are you doing?" you say to Lydia.

...

"What are you doing?" you say to Lydia.

She smiles at you.

...

You and Lydia are having lunch in a pizza joint, and when you come back with the pizza and a bottle of water for yourself and a fountain Diet Coke for Lydia, she looks up from her phone. There are tears in her eyes, but she pretends that she wants your Diet Coke instead. You let her have it. 

"We'll do something nice tonight," you say and watch Lydia as she jams her phone back into her purse. She looks up with her jaw set

After her first slice, while you're idly browsing the free booklet of real estate from the stand by the door, you look down and discover that, underneath the table, Lydia's bare foot is resting on your knee. 

...

Afterwards, because you had been willing to beg, they didn't blow your head off. You were still on your knees, and they dragged you through the house to the basement. "We're putting him down there," the woman said to the guards, and they stepped aside: they threw you down the stairs the basement, and you fell over the bodies of those who had tried to get out and had been shot for their pains or choked before they could make it. Smoke rose.

...

Would your wife have lived longer if she had taken the bite and become a werewolf? What if both of your children had been born werewolves? The Argents eventually realized how stupid it was to try and smoke people to death in a basement. Smoke rose, after all, so they threw some burning furniture down the stairs, then stuffed wolfsbane-impregnated rags into the vents and called it a day: in the end, it was both flame and smoke in the basement, and you remember, through the blood on your face, through Alice finding you in the smoke and din. 

The werewolves had still been the last to die. You survived, you suspect, because Alice lay down over you and your son, covering you both as much as she could with her body. Wolfsbane inhalation would kill a werewolf a lot faster than suffocation. Wolfsbane efficacy was inversely related to body mass.

Alexis, your daughter, the non-werewolf, was already dead. 

You tried to --

...

"You shouldn't do that," you say to Lydia. 

Your fingers are still around her ankle thumb along the inside, against the bone, the curve of your index finger around the other side. The smile slides off her face a little, disappointed, and she tries to pull her foot back. You don't let go, and some part of her remembers. Some part of her recognizes that she should be terrified of this. Of you. And you can see her expression change again.

You let her slide part of her foot out of your grasp, and you see her face relax; you catch her again by the ankle, and her face tightens again. She stifles a noise in her throat, and the kid at the counter manning the register, wearing a stupid-looking paper hat, looks up. 

Slowly, you let go of Lydia's foot, and she pulls it back to her side of the table.

"Done eating?" you say.

"Sure," she says back, mostly because she is scared of you. She isn't sure why she is so scared of you, though. 

You leave a ten dollar bill at the booth, by way of apology for not cleaning up the mess.

...

Where are Lydia's parents? Where are you getting the money for all of this?

...

You and Lydia are driving home, and the radio is on, turned down law. Lydia is looking out the window, and you're driving. Outside, it's strip malls with hills and trees behind them.

Neither of you are talking, but Lydia frowns and turns to look at you. 

"When you and Aunt Alice got divorced, wasn't she -- "

You keep your eyes on the road, and your hands tighten on the steering wheel. You don't believe your expression changes much. "Wasn't she?"

"Pregnant?" 

Your hands tighten again.

"Yes," you say.

You don't ask how she knows, but at least she doesn't ask you how far along Alice had been. After a while, after another little bit of you watching her out of the corner of your eye and seeing her frown and look like she is trying to remember, Lydia asks, "You see the kids these days?" 

"No," you say.

Outside, it's strip malls with hills and trees behind them, and without looking over at Lydia, you make a spot decision and turn into the parking lot of the first drugstore you come across. 

...

From being inside her head, you know the kinkiest thing Lydia ever did with any of her boyfriends, Jackson or otherwise, was pinning them to the bed and maybe, possibly, using novelty handcuffs to hold their wrists together while they went down on her. On the other hand, one time, Jackson asked if she wanted to try anal and was horrified when she thought that he wanted her to fuck _him_ up the ass.

Lydia is in love with Jackson: she never told you in so many words, and all that time when you were inside her head, she never did anything as stupid as even think why he wasn't there to save her. It wasn't that kind of relationship. Jackson wasn't that kind of guy. Lydia wasn't stupid. 

Still, you know. Still, you were inside her head for a very long time. 

...

You pull into the parking lot of a CVS and put the car in park. Lydia undoes her seatbelt and has her hand on the door handle.

"Stay in the car," you say, and she turns at you.

"Really?" she replies, the skepticism in both her voice and her face, and you study her face, the pretty mouth, the reddish-blonde hair, the slight freckles across the cheekbones that're visible now that she doesn't wear quite as much makeup. She looks back at you, still skeptical. 

"Take off your panties," you say, and her mouth falls open a little.

"Come on, Lydia," you add. "You were trying to feel me up. In a pizza parlor. At lunch. With your foot." 

Lydia hesitates, so you put your hand out, palm-up, and she gets that you're serious: you do mean here, in the car, in the middle of the parking lot, in broad daylight. Lydia slides her feet out of her flats, then reaches down and lifts her ass up off the seat and slides them down. Puts them in your hand.

Dark blue. 

"Open your mouth," you say. 

Her eyes don't leave your face, but she opens her mouth, and you stuff her underwear into her mouth. She doesn't have a particularly large mouth, and you see the red on her cheeks. The way they're in her mouth now, she can't quite close her lips around them, can she?

"If you don't want people to see them, open your mouth a little wider," you say. "I'll push them in deeper."

Lydia opens her mouth a little wider, and you oblige by stuffing them in until, if Lydia strains her lips a little, she almost looks like she has her mouth closed: the red is all the way up her cheeks now, bright red, and to see just how far you can get the flush to spread, you hitch her skirt up to her hips. 

"Here," you say, and put one of the books she borrowed in her lap. You even open it up to a page for her. "Why don't you read that?"

She makes a noise in her throat, and you lean over and say, softly, in her ear, "Keep your hands by your sides until I come back." 

You don't need to tell her again to stay in the car.

...

You go to the drugstore. How do you have money to spend? 

...

You pick up a few things. Whose money are you spending? The nurse from the home they'd put you in had a few thousand dollars tucked away, but what paid for your new laptop? Your new leather jacket? Lydia's credit card, yes, but who --

...

When Lydia gets scared --

...

When Lydia gets frightened --

...

You get back to the car with a couple things in a bag, and after being shut up in the car for fifteen minutes, underwear stuffed in her mouth and her skirt hitched up, Lydia is so wet that you can smell it in the air as soon as you open the car door. You can, in fact, almost, taste it on your tongue. She is flushed from the collarbones to her cheekbones and breathing fast through her nose: you drive home with Lydia next to you, arms still by her sides, and you know she is shaking. She started trembling as soon as your started the car, trembled a little more at the first traffic light, had to clench her hands into fists at the turn into the development, and when you push the button the remote that brings the garage door down behind the car, some deep-buried knowledge surfaces, and she tries to run for it.

Her hands, you assume, are slick with sweat. Her legs aren't quite steady, and she gets the car door open, but slips on the concrete floor and knocks her head, hard. You take your time getting out of the car, and she has just pushed herself back up to standing position when you put one hand behind each of her elbows, haul her up, and pin her to the hood of the car, still warm. It doesn't take a lot of strength to do this: she doesn't fight you as much as she could. 

"You remember what happened in this garage?" you say to her. 

She makes a noise that sounds like a sob; her panties are still stuffed in her mouth. 

"Come on, Lydia," you say, softly in her ear. "Where are your parents?"

She makes a noise that is definitely a sob, and she starts to cry, silently, still shaking. 

"What did you do to your parents, Lydia?" you ask. "Don't you remember? Can't you remember?"

You don't even have to nudge her legs apart. Lydia spreads her legs because she wants to, because she is scared, because she is terrified, and you're honestly tempted. Instead, you reach around and gently pull her underwear out of her mouth and leave it on the hood of the car. "Let's go upstairs," you say and take her hand. 

She is still crying, but she takes your hand. 

...

Whose money have you been spending? 

Lydia dug you out of the ground, but she put other things -- other people -- into it. It wasn't even difficult: they trusted her, and she made them drinks with crushed-up sleeping pills at the bottom. You had a few left over from the nurse who had helped you out of the long-term care facility, and you told Lydia where to find them. After her parents were asleep, you had her drag them into the garage and start the car. She closed the door to the garage, but her legs gave out in the kitchen, and she crawled to a corner and trembled and cried without understanding why until it you told her it was time to take the bodies away. 

...

You bought lube at the drugstore, and you go up stairs with Lydia into the master bedroom and fuck her on the bed. She is quiet, docile; you help her out of her dress and unhook her bra. She undoes your shirt, your belt, and you step out of your pants. The two of you kiss for a while, and then, you put Lydia on her back with her legs hanging off the bed. 

"I'm going to get you ready," you tell her, and you go down on her.

After she comes and is relaxed and a little sleepy, you turn her onto her stomach. You pour some lube onto your hand, and start with one finger, work up to two, get your fingers in to the first knuckle, then the second, then to the palm. You proceed from there.

...

You fuck Lydia in the ass on her parents' bed. She is on her knees; she starts with her hands, too, but ends up with them braced against the headboard. You put one arm around her waist, and Lydia doesn't particularly like getting fucked in the ass; once the buzz from her orgasm wears off, she starts to squirm. You get two fingers in, and she starts to sweat in the small of her back. Three fingers in, she gasps, and her hands curl up into fists. "Relax," you say and hold still to give her time to adjust. "Do you want me to stop?"

She seems to have forgotten the car ride; she seems to have forgotten her terror. At least, this is what you think: you suspect she is breathless from pain. 

"Relax," you say, and with your free hand, you uncurl her fists. She slides her palm against yours, and the two of you hold hands. When she does start to relax, you count to thirty, then start to move your fingers again, slow and steady. When Lydia is ready, you slide your fingers out and push your cock into her. She gasps, and you count to thirty before sliding in any further: when you do, Lydia gasps again and bites down on her lip.

She never likes it, but she puts up with it. 

Afterwards, she is lying on her side, eyes half-open, holding very still. The last sunlight of the day lies over the bed, and you go to the bathroom to wash yourself off. When you come back, you touch Lydia on the cheek and say, "Come on. I'll run a bath for you." 

...

Lydia leans forward in the bathtub -- it's one of those big corner Jacuzzi units, though the jets aren't on -- and you soap her back. The tub is three-quarters full with warm water, and Lydia's hair is pinned to the top of her head. Every now and then, you whistle a couple bars of Beatles songs. You used to put _Can't Buy Me Love_ on while doing housework; Alice used to hum _Blackbird_ when putting the children to sleep.

"My mother used to sing that to me," Lydia says, sleepy, sounding content. She closes her eyes, and you have one hand resting on her shoulder. Your other hand is holding a bar of soap. 

You stop mid-note and realize, belatedly, that for the last few minutes, you've been whistling a Simon and Garfunkel song that you didn't even think you liked.  
...

You spent a long time in the long-term care facility; thanks to Alice, the wolfsbane didn't kill you, and thanks to being a fully-grown werewolf, the smoke didn't do it, either. 

You tried to draw Alice's fear and pain from her as she died in the smoke; when the flames were sweeping over you and your son, you tried to pull the pain from him: he was in too much pain to be afraid, and he was too young to heal fast enough to stay alive in the basement. All those years in the wheelchair at the home, staring at the wall, it was more the residue of trying to take too much into your body than the physical scars. Your first clear memory came years later when you realized, with a start, that you were blinking at a corner. It took you days to re-learn how to take a breath and hold it until you wanted to let go. A month before you could make your lips form shapes that could lead to words.

The nurse you met there had been a vicious, terrible woman. She had a night-shift, only-nurse-on-duty hobby of seeing just how much she could get away with -- she made bed-bound patients who could talk beg for ice chips to eat, and she intentionally flushed medication, particularly painkillers, down the drain, or swapped medication. You suspected her of killing a few residents over the years, and you think she had been standing there, chart in her hands and considering what she might be able to get with you when you turned your head and smiled. 

"Hello," you said, smiling. 

Her mouth opened and shut; her eyes got very wide, and to keep her from killing you on the spot, you started talking and didn't stop charming her until you killed her and put her in the trunk of her car. Helpfully, though, before then, Jennifer taught you everything you know about draining bank accounts: it was another hobby of hers, stealing from patients, and not just the petty, small-dollar lifting of personal items. It didn't hurt anyone, did it? People did tend to die anyways, didn't they? 

You don't regret anything you've done.

You aren't sorry about killing Laura Hale to become an alpha.

...

"Here," you say, handing Lydia back from her phone. "Don't drop it in the water."

She snorts, but does take the phone carefully between two fingers that she wipes on a towel: she asked for her phone, so you went and got it from her purse, which you finally found in the car. You watch as she taps in her security code -- it's still the month and day of Jackson's birthday, and you go on watching her face as she frowns at it. Whatever she sees, it doesn't make her happy, and you raise your eyebrows at her, but don't say anything. She hangs her hand over the edge of the tub, and after a moment, drops the phone onto the floor. 

Lydia doesn't say anything 

"Nobody even -- "

There is a long moment, and you wait for her to finish the sentence. 

When it's clear she can't quite bring herself to, you say, "Everything all right, Lydia?"

Then, finally, she starts to cry: not whimpering, or the silent, terrified crying she was doing in the garage with tears on her cheeks but not a single noise coming out of her mouth or throat, or even the screaming from the night she was remembering having you in her head. Instead, her lip starts to tremble, and then her whole face and body just crumple into big, noisy, ugly, full-body, almost hyperventilating, chest-deep sobs, and between gasps, you get out that nobody texted or called or e-mailed. She skipped school. She never skips school. The only time she has been out of school all year was when she was in the hospital or wandering in the woods, and none, none of her friends even checked in to see if she was okay. Not Allison, who is supposed to be her best friend. Not Stiles, who is supposed to be in _love_ with her. And of course not Jackson -- Jackson who -- 

Lydia lets out a sob so deep that it almost sounds like she is choking. You put your arms around her, and she leans into your shoulder and cries and cries and cries; you rock with her, and she puts her arms around your neck and sobs until her throat goes raw and your chest is wet from her tears. 

In fact, the two of you stay like that until bathwater is almost room temperature.

...

What do you remember from your time in Lydia's head? 

...

"There's a lacrosse game tonight," you say to Lydia.

She doesn't look up. 

...

The two of you are sitting in her bedroom. You finally got Lydia out of the bathtub, and she is wrapped up in a pink bathrobe and sitting at her dressing table. You're sitting at the end of her bed, and you've gotten dressed again: shirt, belt, pants. Your feet are bare, though, and Lydia is holding a mug of honey with lemon juice and hot water. You made it up for her after getting her out of the tub, and she looks down at the mug. 

"There's a lacrosse game tonight," you say. "You should go."

"You should go." You repeat the words. "From what you were saying, Jackson will be playing, right?" 

She shrugs. 

"You're a good girl, Lydia Martin," you say. "I think something is going on with Jackson. You should go tonight and watch him." 

She smiles, looking a little tired, and her hands are wrapped around the mug. 

...

What do you remember from your time in Lydia's head? Less than you might expect. You've been burned alive twice. You have a certain fear of fire; you have a certain recollection of the way it feels, first, intense heat in the air next to the skin, then, intense heat upon the skin. Then, full-body disbelief. Then unbearable, incomprehensible pain that only grows more unbearable, more incomprehensible. Bodies are not built to understand the feeling of being burned alive; brains are not built to process a body oxidizing very, very rapidly. 

How do you even know to describe fire as _rapid oxidation_? You were a psychology major in college. 

...

You have a memory that is not yours; You are lying in a bed in Lydia's body, and Jackson curls up behind you. He gives you a key, and Lydia's body, with your mind in it, remembers how nice it was, how safe, how flattered she felt. She loves Jackson. 

Half of the things that she remembers you doing to her weren't your doing. Lydia Martin is a smart girl. Lydia Martin is a strong-willed girl: how would you have known that she had an annual birthday party? Why would you have imagined yourself as a skinny high school captain of a sports team? Some of it was you, but other parts were Lydia's own mind, trying to tell itself a story about what she had become and the things she had done and the things she would do. 

She murdered her parents. She likes it when you fuck her. She is afraid of you, but more terrified of accepting full responsibility for what she has done, what she now is. 

...

"I don't want to go."

"You should go. You'll see your friends. You'll feel better."

"I don't have any friends."

You kiss her on the forehead. "You do have friends. Stiles, right?"

"Stiles." She says this with a little of her usual spirit, rolling her eyes, and you smile. 

"He's a nice boy. You should think about it." She is not into this suggestion, so you say, "How about Allison? And something is wrong with Jackson." 

She looks away, down towards her bed. 

"I hadn't noticed."

"That's a lie," you say, and you tuck a strand of her hair behind her left ear. "You've noticed. Don't tell me things that aren't true, Lydia."

She flinches even you touch her on the cheek, but you kiss her again on the forehead, and you hold her and hold her until she relaxes.

"Go to Stiles. Talk to him about it." 

You hold her for a little longer until she nods, and then, you let go. The sun is almost set, and Lydia gets up and gets dressed. 

You fix her a snack downstairs in the kitchen. 

...

Who are you, Peter Hale? You were a werewolf in a pack, and you were a man with a family. You lost both pack and family on the same day, and you rose from the dead twice, once by a combination of werewolf healing and sheer, murderous hatred, once as an unintended but welcome side effect of biting Lydia Martin. Sometimes, you consider what she would be like as a werewolf; sometimes, you consider what she would be like as part of a pack. Would it have been easier to bring her to heel? Would she still have nightmares about killing her parents? Would part of your mind still be stuck in hers, and would she still have your fear of fire? Would she still pick the clothes out of her closet that you think she looks best in? 

Lydia picks up a baggie of apple slices and cheese from you in the kitchen. She hesitates for a moment, then turns her head, and you kiss her on the cheek. You watch her get into her car; you watch her pull out of the driveway. Again, at the bottom of the driveway, she hesitates, then waves goodbye to you. You wave back, and then, she drives to Stiles's house, to go talk to him before the game. You go back inside the house, smiling. 

You make yourself coffee on her parents' fancy machine. 

...

What are you, Peter Hale? 

Alive.

**Author's Note:**

> All the good parts of this are destronomics, including the idea that Lydia offed her parents. This fic would never have gotten written without the support of Destronomics and Marmolita. 
> 
> Title from a variant of the Red Riding Hood tale where Red Riding Hood comments on what big eyes, what a big mouth, and what big, big teeth the wolf has.


End file.
